Under Two Flags eBook

“Do you suppose that a man happy enough to wear
Lady Guenevere’s colors could lose? An
embroidered scarf given by such hands has been a gage
of victory ever since the days of tournaments!”
murmured Cecil with the softest tenderness, but just
enough laziness in the tone and laughter in the eye
to make it highly doubtful whether he was not laughing
both at her and at himself, and was wondering why
the deuce a fellow had to talk such nonsense.
Yet she was Lady Guenevere, with whom he had been in
love ever since they stayed together at Belvoir for
the Croxton Park week the autumn previous; and who
was beautiful enough to make their “friendship”
as enchanting as a page out of the “Decamerone.”
And while he bent over her, flirting in the fashion
that made him the darling of the drawing-rooms, and
looking down into her superb Velasquez eyes, he did
not know, and if he had known would have been careless
of it, that afar off, while with rage, and with his
gaze straining on to the course through his race-glass,
Ben Davis, “the welsher,” who had watched
the finish—­watched the “Guards’
Crack” landed at the distance—­muttered,
with a mastiff’s savage growl:

“He wins, does he? Curse him! The
d——­d swell—­he shan’t
win long.”

CHAPTER IV.

Love A lamode.

Life was very pleasant at Royallieu.

It lay in the Melton country, and was equally well
placed for Pytchley, Quorn, and Belvoir, besides possessing
its own small but very perfect pack of “little
ladies,” or the “demoiselles,” as
they were severally nicknamed; the game was closely
preserved, pheasants were fed on Indian corn till
they were the finest birds in the country, and in the
little winding paths of the elder and bilberry coverts
thirty first-rate shots, with two loading-men to each,
could find flock and feather to amuse them till dinner,
with rocketers and warm corners enough to content the
most insatiate of knickerbockered gunners. The
stud was superb; the cook, a French artist of consummate
genius, who had a brougham to his own use and wore
diamonds of the first water; in the broad beech-studded
grassy lands no lesser thing than doe and deer ever
swept through the thick ferns in the sunlight and
the shadow; a retinue of powdered servants filled
the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in
its stately banqueting room, with its scarlet and
gold, its Vandykes and its Vernets, and yet—­there
was terribly little money at Royallieu with it all.
Its present luxury was purchased at the cost of the
future, and the parasite of extravagance was constantly
sapping, unseen, the gallant old Norman-planted oak
of the family-tree. But then, who thought of that?
Nobody. It was the way of the House never to take
count of the morrow. True, any one of them would
have died a hundred deaths rather than have had one
acre of the beautiful green diadem of woods felled
by the ax of the timber contractor, or passed to the